Wednesday, October 25, 2006

fight the good fight???

...or just give in to the inevitable? We are becoming a society willing to give up citizenship and community more and more as we become not just consumers, but Consumers.

below is a quote (which includes a sub-quote) from The Reinvention of Work by Matthew Fox, which I am reading for my Work & Life class in school.

"Czechoslovakian playwright and former president Vaclav Havel warns fo the spiritual disease engendered by a consumer culture--one in which a "desparate substitute for living" is represented as human life:

'In the interest of the smooth management of society, then, society's attention is deliberately divererted from itself, that is, from social concerns. By nailing a man's whole attention to the floor of his mere consumer interests, it is hoped to render him incapable of appreciating the ever-increasing degree of his spiritual, political and moral degradation.'

Life becomes "reduced to a a hunt for consumer goods," and freedom becomes trivialized to mean "a chance freely to choose which washin machine or refrigerator {one} wants to buy." Consumer bliss has the effect of diverting people's energy away from the community to the self... Clearly the price the community pays for consumerism is very steep."

I don't really think i need to add anything right now, besides I need to eat or i may faint.

4 comments:

"In the world I see - you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You'll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You'll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower . And when you look down, you'll see tiny figures pounding corn , laying strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighway"